What has caused the latest downing is unknown. A DDoS attack is the most likely culprit but these do not usually take hours to deflect. A more serious incursion is starting to look at least possible; the outage is now even longer than that allegedly caused by Cleary.

The value of attacking the site is, of course, only symbolic, a means of drawing attention to the hacker’s cause or simply embarrassing the UK’s most strategic policing organisation, and the very one-handed job of coping with cybercrime.

Only days ago SOCA trumpeted its latest cybercrime coup, taking part in the closing down of 36 websites used by criminals around the world to sell stolen card and bank details.